Writing notes as a substitute of typing pits students in opposition to one another

Think about you’re a scholar in highschool or faculty. Class is about to start out. You might be confronted with a notable dilemma: Do you have to whip out a pocket book or a laptop computer to take notes?

The reply shouldn’t be so easy. A yr in the past, paper and pen gave the impression to be the winner when the journal Frontiers in Psychology printed a Norwegian research that documented how completely different areas of the mind have been speaking extra regularly when college students have been writing by hand. When college students have been typing, the mind was not practically so energetic. This further mind exercise, the neuroscientists wrote, is “useful for studying.” 

The research ricocheted around the globe. Nearly 200 information tales promoted the concept that we keep in mind issues higher once we write them down by hand as a substitute of typing. It confirmed what many people instinctively really feel. That’s why I nonetheless take notes in a pocket book regardless that I can hardly learn my hen scratch.

But earlier this month, the identical tutorial journal printed a scathing rebuttal to the handwriting research. A pair of scientists in Spain and France identified that not one of the Norwegian faculty college students was requested to study something within the laboratory experiment. “Drawing conclusions on studying processes in youngsters in a classroom from a lab research carried out on a bunch of college college students that didn’t embody any sort of studying appears slippery at finest,” the critics wrote.

The Norwegian research requested 36 faculty college students of their early 20s to jot down phrases from the sport Pictionary utilizing both a digital pen on a touchscreen or typing on a keyboard. The members wore stretchy hair nets studded with electrodes to seize their mind exercise. The scientists documented the variations between the 2 modes of writing. 

Neither mode approximated actual life situations. The scholars have been instructed to jot down in cursive with out lifting the stylus from the display screen. And so they have been solely allowed to sort with their proper index finger.

The critics additionally questioned whether or not elevated mind exercise is proof of higher studying. Elevated mind exercise may equally be interpreted as an indication that handwriting is slower and extra taxing than typing. We don’t know.

I contacted Audrey van der Meer, one of many co-authors of the Norwegian research who runs a neuroscience lab on the Norwegian College of Science and Expertise in Trondheim. She identified that her critics promote using keyboards in training, and they also is probably not unbiased. However she admitted that her research didn’t take a look at whether or not college students discovered something. 

Van der Meer is conducting a recent experiment that entails precise studying with 140 youngsters. She had the highschool college students watch a recorded lecture. Half of them have been randomly assigned to take notes by hand, utilizing a digital pen and touchscreen, and the opposite half typed their notes. Afterward, all of them took the identical examination graded by lecturers on the college. 

To date, she’s seen clear variations in note-taking types. Those that typed their notes wrote considerably extra phrases, usually transcribing elements of the lecture verbatim. They didn’t make any drawings. Those that used a digital pen primarily wrote key phrases and brief sentences and produced two drawings, on common. 

In keeping with van der Meer, college students who use the keyboard are writing down the whole lot the instructor says “as a result of they’ll.” However, she mentioned in an e mail, “the knowledge seems to be coming in via the ears and, with none type of processing, going out via the fingertips.” She added that when taking notes by hand, “it’s unattainable to jot down down the whole lot, so college students must course of the incoming data, summarize it, and hyperlink it to data they have already got.” That helps the “new data to stay higher, leading to higher retention.”

Van der Meer mentioned she couldn’t but share the examination outcomes with me as she continues to be analyzing them. She defined that there are “many confounding variables” that make it troublesome to inform if those that used handwritten notes carried out higher on the examination.

Even the pro-typing scientists admit that handwriting is vital. Earlier analysis has proven that writing letters by hand, in comparison with typing them, helps younger youngsters study their letters a lot better. A 2015 research discovered that adults have been higher capable of recall phrases in a reminiscence recreation once they wrote them down by hand first as a substitute of typing them. And a 2010 guide chapter documented constructive associations between writing phrases and with the ability to learn them. 

Whereas there’s pretty compelling proof that handwriting will help youngsters study their letters and new phrases, there’s much less proof that handwriting helps us take up new data and concepts. That’s to not say the Norwegian neuroscientists are mistaken. However we nonetheless want the proof.

I’d additionally add that not all studying is identical. Studying to jot down is completely different from studying Spanish vocabulary. There could also be instances when typing is the perfect solution to study one thing and different instances when handwriting is. Additionally, studying one thing entails excess of both typing or handwriting, and the strategy we use to take notes may finally be of small significance in comparison with how we research our notes afterwards. 

Within the meantime, the place did I put my pocket book?

Contact employees author Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about handwriting versus typing was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, unbiased information group targeted on inequality and innovation in training. JoinProof Factors and different Hechinger newsletters.